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Identified as a trouble maker by the authorities since childhood, and resolved to live up to the description, Charles Carreon soon discovered that mischief is most effectively fomented through speech. Having mastered the art of flinging verbal pipe-bombs and molotov cocktails at an early age, he refined his skills by writing legal briefs and journalistic exposes, while developing a poetic style that meandered from the lyrical to the political. Journey with him into the dark caves of the human experience, illuminated by the torch of an outraged sense of injustice.

Everybody knows what a parody is. My favorite is The Beggar’s Opera, by John Gay, in which he laid funny lyrics over tunes of the day, back ihoten the Neoclassical Era of English Literature, the precise dates of which I forever remain fuzzy on. I didn’t feel like I missed much from not knowing the originals of the tunes that Gay had written over the melodies of, but probably there are a lot of extra laughs to be harvested by getting those original lyrics and doing a comparison. Probably someone’s done that by now and it’s online, but I’m not going to search for it just right now.

Because I’m on a mission to get a meaningful definition of parody out of this session at the keyboard. And I’m not going to just look it up and report what I find. I’m going to think. Weird, huh?

See, when you think, sometimes you contradict yourself, and you often seem to. I seem to have contradicted myself, because my opening line says everyone knows what parody is, and the opening line of the second paragraph says I’m looking for a definition of parody. It only seems contradictory, though. In the first paragraph, I gave you an example with which you would automatically agree, especially if you know The Beggars Opera. It is a perfect example of the form, lacking nothing.

The parody presented by The Beggars Opera is deep and multi-leveled. All of British society, notoriously class-stratified, is defined as being of a piece, for as Gay’s introductory character says, “It is difficult to determine whether (in the fashionable vices) the fine gentlemen imitate the gentlemen of the road, or the gentlemen of the road the fine gentlemen.” Gay creates a parody of high manners in low places, replacing the delicate lyrics of popular English songs with the wisdom of whores and highwaymen. The results are delicious. I enjoyed reading it, hearing it in a recording, and most enjoyably, in an incredible performance at McCabes in Santa Monica, back in the early nineties. Took the whole family to get an eyeful of a truly saucy production. My dad, who took me to a few Broadway shows over the years, would have been proud. The kids felt like they’d seen more than a spectacle. They had glimpsed strange doings on that misty island towards which they were sailing – adulthood.

There are of course other very famous parodists, like Weird Al Yankovic, who made himself on the back of Michael Jackson and more power to him — the guy was funny. My favorite parody of the Michael Jackson Billy Jean video is one Steve Martin did for “The New Show,” a comedy vehicle that went nowhere, but had a great first show. I was going to law school at that time, poor as a churchmouse and always in need of cheap entertainment for the kids.

In those days, Michael Jackson was a god in LA, and that Steve Martin parody of Billy Jean practically caused me to die laughing. I noted it down as one of the most enjoyable TV moments of my life. Well, obviously, as I view it again today on the flatscreen, context is everything when you’re trying to get parodic punch. In order to enjoy the parody to its full extent, you need to know the original. Of course it shows how independently fine a librettist John Gay was, that The Beggar’s Opera is wonderfully enjoyable with no knowledge of the original songs whose tunes he borrowed. This is not the fate of most parodists, whose works, like clinging vines, require a strong tree to affix themselves to.

Too late now for a reprieve — the light is in the sky and there is still no parody at Charles-Carreon.com

Nowadays, there’s a lot of people claiming to be parodists who wouldn’t know how to execute a parody if they were told they would die at sunrise if they failed to do so. The operator of Charles-Carreon.com is such a man. I can imagine Popehat, in his cups, at the end of a long, boring night in his glassed-in command post, looking over the smoggy skyline towards San Bernardino, getting his jollies sending Recouvreur a text telling him he’ll hang at dawn if he can’t actually launch a real parody site against Carreon before the first rays of sun tint the sky. Poor Christopher would probably not be shocked to be told that he has fallen far short of executing a real parody.

Christopher Recouvreur is not a parodist. He is a fabulist. He makes things up about me. He imagines me doing things, and imagines my wife doing things, and puts words in the mouth of “Charles Carreon.” These words he puts in my mouth are like nothing I have ever said or would say. There’s no ironic play on my true character. He’s pretending that Charles Carreon is a silly guy, that his brain works in funny ways, and that everyone should make fun of him. There’s no parody there.

I mean, I’ve done a few parodies, so I would recognize it if someone actually parodied me. Like I took the “Hotel California” tune and wrote anti-Bush lyrics for it in “Hotel Babylonia.” I ripped off Elton John and did that “Condoleezza” song about George W. Bush’s love for his Secretary of State. I stole Elvis’ “Blue Suede Shoes” as the music for my late-term craziness opus – “The Old Ve-to,” and clipped the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” for my tour-de-force reconciliation of the opposites – “Vlad and Me.” I’ve put funny political lyrics in rock tunes lampooning conservative politicians and policies – a harmless enjoyment that is probably sufficient to get you some unwelcome attention. Like from faux parodists like Recouvreur, a Rapeutationist pretending to be an artist. Give you any odds that he did not draw that cartoon of me on the dinosaur. (Can I buy it?)

If you were an artist, and you wanted to parody me, you would have to actually look at what I have done, and start making fun of that, which of course would be possible, because everything can be made fun of, and I make the job easier by engaging in outlier behavior, like leaving the big city law grind, spending years living in yurts in the woods of Southern Oregon, and having a well-known identification with rock and rollers as heroes. C’mon, guys! There’s stuff to work with here. I’m Mexican, and you can always parody Mexicans easily, can’t you? Oh, I don’t fit the stereotype! Damn! I’ve written smart-alecky songs like “Explode on the Border,” with inflammatory lyrics like, “I’ll show you what this burrito’s for!” Don’t be lazy. You can use that.

It’s almost like my enemies don’t really care. They put all this time into researching me, and they don’t find anything to parody me about. They just don’t see the material, because they don’t have a creative bone in their body. All they’re looking for is stuff that is easily recognizable as “dirt,” bad things that Charles Carreon did or was associated with. So they miss all the thousands of ways that they could actually parody me. No surprise. They’re not parodists, they’re just poo-flingin’ zombies on a mission to paint the town brown. Since they can’t find much dirt about me, they invent dirt with lies and damn lies, expand the tiny amount of dirt that does exist, and make up the difference with plain ole “Fuck that bastard!”

This entire post flies in the face of an old saying of mine: “Never fault your enemies for ineptitude that accrues to your benefit.” Think about it. With this information, Popehat might be moved to fire Recouvreur and have someone else parody me who would be much better at it. Then again, a real parody of me would be funny, and probably much better than simply being mocked by a jackass. C’est la vie. Popehat’ll never do it. He’s just too cheap.

Why is it that when bad things happen to other people, we don’t feel them in the same way as when they happen to us? We have a lot of faith in other people’s capacity to bear stress and pain. For all the bad things he says about me, Ken Popehat White has a lot of faith in my actual mental stability. He’s not afraid that I’ll hurt him physically or destroy his property. That’s nice, because I wouldn’t want him or anyone to worry about their physical safety on my account. The whole concept of forsaking violence as a cost of being a member of civilized society seems, to me, a fair trade. I don’t maim you, you don’t kidnap my children. We have to draw the line somewhere. Verbal violence, imagistic violence, poses and threats, all blur together. Communication pumped up with hostility can be eloquent and beautiful, crude and offensive, menacing and scary. Y’know, punk rock? It’s hard, real hard to put limits on speech based on its content. The more we allow ourselves to see, hear and think previously taboo thoughts, the more we realize many of the taboos are ridiculous. But not all of them.

There is a taboo on getting involved in fantasizing graphic violence being committed upon your chosen victims. Gilberto Valle violated that taboo at length and is now facing life in prison for plotting to kidnap and murder women. Most people think that this means that he “is guilty.” No, that is a misunderstanding of reality. Criminal guilt is an absolute concept defined by the criminal law, and the jury was given the task of trying, to the best of their limited ability, to decide whether Valle had a criminal state of mind when he wrote all those emails discussing which women he would kidnap, how he would kill them and eat them, etc. The jury concluded that he’s guilty because they were willing to decide that they knew, beyond a reasonable doubt, what was going on in Valle’s mind when he wrote the things he wrote. As Daniel Engber wrote in Slate, after observing a couple of days of the trial:

[i]t’s hard to say exactly what valle is accused of doing in the first place. he never kidnapped anyone, or raped anyone, or murdered anyone. he was never violent to the women who will take the stand. he’s never tasted human flesh. but he thought about these things, and he talked about these things. he may have even taken steps to plan them out. but did he really mean to do them?

Engber’s article seems like a reliable account of a case that was shaping up to go either way, depending entirely on the jurors. Valle exchanged a lot of emails with another guy whose wife said she knew he engaged in these crazy pretend-to-plan-to-kidnap-someone games with other people online, and a third guy, who was like a dungeonmaster type in England who was egging them on. The conspiracy conviction, of course, is quite unlikely to be overturned on the grounds that Valle didn’t commit overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracies, because writing people emails telling them you’re going to buy rope to tie somebody up and a cattle prod to torture them is an overt act in furtherance of a conspiracy. But some jurors would like to see the rope and the cattle prod, while other jurors will send you to jail just for having a nasty shopping list.

Meanwhile, back at the funny farm, Ken Popehat White is up to his snout in the fine print of when verbal threats become criminal because, because, well because, goddamn, he’s been threatened. He thinks. Well not him, really, but another lawyer might think, that this guy Bill Schmalfeldt has threatened him. He’s really annoyed about it, because he republished the better part of the guy’s rant. What’s so funny is how White threatens Schmalfeldt while claiming he is not threatening him. White gives us the word for what he’s doing when he threatens to report someone to the prosecution by not reporting them to the prosecution, and merely writing a long, detailed blog post purporting to analyze the criminality of threats of physical violence. The word is “apophasis,” that Popehat explains is “the rhetorical device of saying something by asserting you are not saying it.” I’m just sayin’.

Sparking Up A Cyber-Frankenstein: Pushing Yellow Journalism to the Megacrowdby Charles Carreon

August 12, 2013

Popehat does the thing he should not do, and creates the being that should not exist.

Vampires are big today, but in the movieland of my childhood, Frankenstein was the Big Kahuna. True, Dracula was frightening, in a very creepy way, but he was also limited in his ability to inflict harm. Somewhat like the bishop in chess, who is limited to either the white or the black squares, Dracula was allergic to sunlight, garlic and crosses. Not Frankenstein, who strode about in broad daylight, seemed omnivorous, and could be relied upon to turn a crucifix into a club with great swiftness. The movie-monster Frankenstein of my childhood was mindlessly animate, in gear and on target. Once he discovered that he was not wanted by humans, he became utterly insensible to the suffering of human beings. Poor beast, to be so misunderstood, when he meant no harm! How touching, the scene where he sways entranced before the old, blind violinist, who doesn’t fear him because he can’t see him, and his granddaughter, whose innocence allows the monster to experience human kindness once. Then, never again!

From a classical moral perspective, what is wrong with Frankenstein is that he should not have been created, and his maker committed a mortal folly when he dared to frame a simulation of a man’s body from bits of corpses. Frankenstein has no soul, and is a cursed being, brought into existence by the hubris of a young man too eager to scale the pinnacles of scientific achievement without prior reflection on the moral consequences of his “creation.”

While it is fortunately impossible to duplicate the feat Mary Shelley premised her novel upon, it is still possible for clever persons to conjure new minds into existence. Every speaker who draws a crowd conjures a crowd mind into existence. This is not a metaphor, but a reality. A crowd has a body that flows like water, as nicely illustrated by this Black Friday crowd cascading into an Urban Outfitters. The physical strength of a crowd aggregates, causing people to feel less vulnerable to counterattack in a crowd, and therefore more willing to engage in attack. See the example of some very pugnacious conduct at the leading edge of an English crowd at this link.

A crowd mind is missing some of the features of the individual minds from which it arises. As I explained in a prior post, due to the Pizza Effect, the crowd mind is composed only of those mental faculties that aggregate, like physical strength and emotion, and lacks intellectual ability, that does not aggregate. So when you are feeling like everyone else in the crowd, you are dumber than usual, because you are no smarter than anyone else in the crowd. When Isaac Asimov invented the science of “psychohistory,” he was relying on the Pizza Effect when he said that although the behavior of individuals could not be predicted, the behavior of large numbers of people could –- because the aggregate of their impulses was a much more limited universe of possibilities than the impulses of a single individual. One impact of the Pizza Effect on our society is, in fact, that people eat a lot of pizza; indeed, the volume of pizza eaten in the United States has grown every year since it appeared on the market after the Second World War. Asimov would have predicted it, easily, if he’d ever bothered to give it thought.

Sometimes nations behave like organizations capable of deliberate behavior. Governments try to act cool and collected when they confront a crisis, but at the core, there is a fear of the people degenerating back into a crowd, a mob without clear purpose, but filled with urgent needs. During the last decade, one nation after another has seen the organized surface of governments convulse, revealing the seething human crowd mind, aggregating only frustration, fear, and demand, looking for guidance from some source. And those who are willing to provide guidance to a crowd can never be trusted.

There must have been nothing more satisfying for William Randolph Hearst than to know that he’d started another war and his friends at the Bohemian Grove were going to be damned happy about it. It seems he was confident about his ability to deliver an international incident on schedule:

In 1897, prior to the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine, Frederic Remington, an artist hired by William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York Journal, went to Cuba with noted writer Richard Harding Davis to provide illustrations to accompany a series of articles on the Revolution. Arriving in Havana in January of 1897, Remington soon became bored with seemingly peaceful Cuba and wired Hearst:

“Everything is quiet. There is no trouble. There will be no war. I wish to return.”

So to take a lesson on how to inflame the masses with lies, we must examine Hearst. In “A Moment in the Sun,” author John Sayles assumes Hearst’s viewpoint in the opening to a chapter entitled “The Daily Outrage,” giving an insight into how Hearst caused newsboys to spread blatant, inflammatory lies by using a clever typographical trick, a “split” headline, that is, one written in two point-sizes, like this one:

AMERICAN GENERALS WANT

MORE TROOPS IF WE ARE

TO FIGHT SPAIN

Sayles implies that Hearst printed it that way so the urchins who hawked his papers would stand on street corners yelling, “AMERICAN GENERALS WANT TO FIGHT SPAIN!” This is a compelling insight into one of Hearst’s clever tools for inflicting his version of reality on all of society. Through third parties like newsboys who abbreviated “split heads” to produce a false statement, he got to say things he couldn’t say himself.

As a summary of the most common lies told about me by 105 Rapeutationists http://rapeutation.com/rapeumain.rapeutationists.htm clearly shows, if you believed all the lies told about me with respect to the Oatmeal litigation, you’d have an entirely false version of events and of me. Since all of the 105 Rapeutationists listed on the chart reinforce each other’s credibility with mutual backpatting in cross-comments on each other’s blogs, the cross-pollination of their intellects is too slavish to entertain criticism. Thus, they have no motive to point out errors in the Charles Carreon story on their buddy’s blog. Indeed, any tendency toward criticism of other Rapeutationists would be rejected automatically as counter-rapeutational behavior that one might have to account for. Rapeutationing is not peer review. Rapeutationing means conducting a distributed disinformation campaign against a person who, seen in a truthful light, deserves no abuse whatsoever, in order to justify the abuse. The Rapeutationists cannot credibly say, “Well, everybody would have hated you anyway, even if they’d known the literal truth,” because they can’t answer this question honestly: “Why would you bother to tell a lie that made no difference?” When it’s a lie that you bother to tell in an article that’s all about shaming Charles Carreon, then we presume you felt it had some “defamatory sting.”

Hearst was such a skillful Father of Lies that he could cause them to be shouted from the lips of innocent “street Arabs,” as homeless children were then known, who fanned the flames of war without a flicker of concern for their actions. Hearst put the machinery of distortion in motion so deftly that no one could attribute ill will to him – as if he should be responsible for the grammatical errors of urchins!

So who is the Father of Lies in my Rapeutation? Well gosh, gee golly, I’m going to go with the undisputed facts, and say “Ken Popehat White!” It’s an honor he’s won by exerting a lot of effort, putting in a lot of time urging people to hate me that he could have spent with his family. But what’s more “family” than trying to destroy someone else’s Dad? So his kid’s probably pretty understanding about “Dad’s hobby.” Kinda cool when you think about it. Unbeknownst to all but a few, he’s a Free Speech Mafioso, character assassin for hire, lead operative on important Rapeutations. To everyone else, he’s just a nice family guy who empties his own garbage and walks the dog.

It’s the volume of work being produced that tips you off that you may be dealing with a professional hatchet-man. As I review the products of research into Popehat, I’m struck by the amount of time spent on the activity, and the very large number of his Rapeutation victims. I gradually have drifted from thinking that it was absurd to imagine he’d be getting paid to conduct Rapeutations to entertaining the possibility in theory, to definitely not ruling it out.

He could be working for somebody steady, like Lenny Sands works for Howard Hughes in James Ellroy’s “American Tabloid,” stalking and exposing Hollywood personalities Hughes wants to pressure for business purposes, or wants to crush because they obstruct his right wing social agendas. Or he could run a sleaze-for-hire shop of that sort that have existed in LA since the first swindlers showed up to sell whatever suckers would pay for. Ellroy’s character Ward Littell, a lawyer/FBI agent who turns from a Kennedy worshipper to a conspirator in his assassination, is the very epitome of a person who traffics in black information, gathered from law enforcement, private investigators and freelance mercenaries at a very high level. Ken Popehat White might be a sort of micro-version of Ward Littell, gathering his information from his “army of Davids,” and spreading his poison through the same network.

Once you have your network of disinformationists, tried and tested in one Rapeutation after another, it works like a well-oiled machine. Like Hearst, Popehat can deliver a DIRA on schedule, and like Hearst, it’s his signature to seize victory by claiming it boldly. The last headline quoted by Sayles delivers the war Hearst promised Remington in his telegram, and is triumphantly brief:

WAR? SURE!

Because the jump from rationality to irrationality must be quick! Once we have been brought to the brink of a calamitous decision by a series of events, each one ringing with national significance, the skillful shaper of the crowd mind presents the decision as a fait accompli.

When we think of the dangers that can befall us when the crowd mind takes action, we should consider that our Congress evermore resembles a frightened crowd, rather than a deliberative body. Remember those heady days in 2001 and 2002 when war fever seized Congress, and all but one Congresswoman acted in unison to issue the “Authorization for Use of Military Force?” A product of the Congressional crowd mind, the AUMF is so broad and ill-drafted that the Obama administration argues that it justifies new laws subjecting Americans to the risk of indefinite detention for vague offenses of the “giving comfort to the enemy” sort, unconstitutionally adopted by Congress in Section 1021(b) of the National Defense Authorization Act for the Fiscal Year 2012. In one moment of Congressional crowd mind, mistaken for “patriotism,” our elected representatives blotted out two centuries of logically developed, sound constitutional jurisprudence that protected our national integrity and individual liberty. What stampeded the Democratic Congress into giving Bush the AUMF? Why did the nation have to go to war in Iraq? The answer was of the simple sort that even the crowd mind can comprehend: “Because they hate our freedoms.”

When Ken Popehat White, in one of his early screeds contra Carreon, said that “Carreon hates freedom,” he drew from the same well of negative sentiment as George W. Bush when he accused Osama bin Laden of the same offense. What better way to kick off a DIRA? Invoke the spirit of 9/11! When he kicks off a DIRA, Popehat brings a crowd mind into existence that, like Frankenstein, should not exist. It is a crowd mind that is entirely devoted to self-pleasuring, and lacks all moral restraint, exactly like the crowd mind that Derren Brown whipped into existence in less than twenty minutes, inducing the Milgram-Zimbardo effect in record time, in his Gameshow Experiment. While careful social scientists can certainly find shortcomings in the design of Brown’s “experiment,” given what we already know about the phenomenon of “de-individuation” that leads to the absorption and disappearance of the individual mind in the crowd mind, it can simply be taken as an entertaining demonstration of how a crowd can easily be guided into a series of cruel actions by an engaging host who turns off inhibitions, turns up the arousal, and plays the crowd mind’s simple keyboard with ease.

Crowds are prone to sudden reversals of position, a topic that forms the theme of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” The Roman mobs have a central role in the play. In the opening scene, members of a crowd celebrating Julius Caesar’s assent to power are reviled by a character whose good sense recoils at the scene. He calls them “you blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things,” because they had so recently celebrated the rule of Pompey, who was overthrown by Caesar. By the end of the play, Brutus, Cassius, and Caesar’s other killers are being pursued by the mob, whipped into a frenzy by Marc Antony’s deft manipulation of their sentiments.

The pendulum swings of the crowd mind can cause grave social changes, carrying nations into blood-stained revolutions, that fail to resolve the painful causes of the upheaval, until at last crowd-action subsides, and reasoned, humane efforts to address real problems are made. We can see this process in several Latin American countries, like Argentina and Chile, that have staggered unevenly away from the legacy of oligarchical oppression.

It is hard to realize that crowd mind is really not much good for anything besides having a good time at a concert or game. When the game spills out of the stadium and turns into a soccer mob, there’s no benefit to anyone, and danger to many. Nevertheless, we have entered the age of mass social control through the Internet, and we are going to see a great deal more crowd-mind activity, and an increasing frustration from a growing number of just plain folks who know that you can’t run a society in which rapeutations can be conducted with impunity, destroying the economic viability of individuals and businesses, because of the whimsical, malicious behavior of a relatively small proportion of Internet users who use and abuse the substantial margin of privilege secured to them by the good offices of the Free Speech Mafia.

Often, the realization that crowd mind is out of control prompts a swing away from anarchy, toward fascism, in the crowd mind itself. There is no possibility of self-reflection in a crowd, giving rise to the realization that it is acting irrationally. It is elementary crowd psychology that crowds do today what they regret tomorrow. So those who fan the flames of anarchy, who encourage youth to man the barricades and occupy the parks and public places, are often discovered, when the cycle of history has turned once again, to have been but agent provocateurs for the forces of oppression.

Popehat’s short term agenda is to turn the Internet into a place where no one can find refuge from the rage of a crowd that wants more than anything to feel its own power, to confirm its own existence by making a mark. Popehat’s long term agenda is likely more typical of persons who indulge, as Hearst did and he does, in bellicose tub-thumping, while wrapping himself in constitutional virtue – a return to tyranny, designed by reliable old white guys who look just like Ken Popehat White.

A few weeks after the Rodney King-inspired L.A. riots of 1992, my son Joshua, then attending Santa Monica High, asked me, “Did you know the LAPD is changing its motto from ‘To serve and protect?’”

“No,” I answered. “What are they changing it to?”

“We treat you like a King!” he answered with laughing eyes asparkle.

I laughed and told him, “Yeah, well next time you see an LAPD black and white, you look at the fenders, and you’ll see hundreds of tiny little dings all down the side of the car. Those little dings were made by the belt-buckles of suspects thrown up against the car. So mind you don’t end up making one of those impressions.”

About another week later, Josh told me breathlessly, “You know what you told me about the dings in the cop car fenders? Well I looked, and you were right!” I nodded with fatherly certitude. “Yeah, they’re almost all that way.”

Raising a boy in L.A. who liked to play with Krylon in empty lots required that type of information sharing. Of course, I had been manhandled by a gang of LAPD cycle cops one evening after my motorcycle got smacked out from under me like a toy hit by a billiard ball at fifty miles an hour, leaving me adrenaline-pumped and in no mood to see my bike impounded for a crime it did not commit. As the cycle pigs hauled on my arms, two on each one, I groaned, “Can we talk about this?” One blue meanie yelled in my ear, “We’ll talk about it after we break your arms, asshole!” Alas, fifteen years of aikido, yoga and taichi conspired to frustrate the good officers’ plan, and they finally gave up on the break-first, talk-later approach when I yelled, “For God’s sake, I’m a law student!” After the parting insults, they dispersed, leaving me to chat with the decent patrolman who told me where to de-impound my bike, and apologized for the conduct of the biker cops.

For about a year after that, I understood why LAPD shoot a lot of people. A lot of people want to shoot them because of the shit they pull. I certainly hoped a wad of lead would be the just rewards for the bastards who beat me up, and believe me, my arm hurt a long time after that. Not, of course, as long as Rodney King’s injuries.

Rodney’s purported sin, the one cops claimed justified the infamous beating that not one out of a hundred white men could survive, was one with which I am, nevertheless, quite familiar. They said that he resisted. That as he lay, flat on the ground, every involuntary twitch struck terror into the hearts of the big, club-wielding macho men. So they hit him again, and again, and again. Fifty-six times, as I recall.

And the all-white Simi-Valley jury, drawn from the well-known police-bedroom-community that houses the Ronald Reagan memorial library, bought that story. They acquitted those murder-minded embarrassments to the concept of just law-enforcement. And a city exploded in anger. Less than a year later, I moved out of L.A. with my family. The pleasure of living there was gone. A bitter scum of race hatred had started to circulate through the city, and I no longer felt safe. To put the lock on it, I tried a carjacking-related case in which black gangsters featured prominently, and I spent a lot of time dealing with some very decent LAPD cops as witnesses. The gang death toll for the year was in the triple digits before my birthday in April of 1994, and by the time I’d turned 38, we were residents of Ashland, Oregon again.

The LAPD cops didn’t call it “King Syndrome,” but I could define it as: “A defense to continued assault upon a prostrate victim whose failure to remain completely immobile while suffering a severe beating indicates, to the attacker, a continued effort to resist the beating.”

Of course, the killer pigs who pounded Rodney’s body into blood-soaked hamburger had to blame Rodney for the treatment they were administering. But what everyone in touch with reality knew was that the casual steadiness with which the cops committed their brutal baton bukkake revealed that this event was good times. It was a candid view of sadists torturing a man at taxpayer expense. It was way fucked up.

That LAPD beat people to death was no surprise to me. Even as a lad, my father told me that LAPD had beat my uncle Ray Hunter to death. Uncle Ray got rich selling a patent medicine remedy called “fluora-cubes,” a sort of chelation agent, as best I can determine. Ray apparently got on the wrong side of the L.A. enforcers by joining the L.A. Country Club, and insulting prominent physicians on the golf-course with his brazen sales pitch that literally involved telling people they were full of shit because they weren’t flushing their system with fluora-cubes. His wife, my Aunt Ray, discovered him in a hospital for the homeless, three days after he disappeared, beaten to a pulp, dying, and shortly, dead. She was left to raise their daughter in the house he’d bought them in the Normandy district of L.A.

But I digress and you grow impatient. Lured here with the magic phrase “Streisand Effect,” you’ve been treated to a civil rights lecture drenched in noir. So let us onward to the obvious.

The very term “Streisand Effect” is a Rapeutationist trick — taking over a great name, associating it with an idea the Rapeutationists want to advance, and destroying its prior beneficial association with the great person. “Streisand” was associated with the stirring love songs dear to the generation that came to adulthood in the sixties. She gave enjoyment and meaning to life for millions of people. Even I remember singing along to “People” with great enjoyment when I was an adolescent.

Now, because Barbra did what — acted litigiously in one circumstance of her life — her achievements are obscured by the howlings of a chorus of digital hyenas? She is a laughing-stock?

Well, in the minds of those who take what is written by Rapeutationists as true — yes. And one of the nation’s most loved and lauded singers is, first, a signal idiot, and second, a musical footnote. Why? Because she resisted. Take it from one of my own Rapeutationists, Robert Stacy McCain, whose sage advice is as follows:

Look: If you are ever in a situation where your stupidity makes you a target, the correct thing to do is . . . nothing. Don’t react. Don’t try to defend yourself. Don’t lash out at your tormenters. Just ignore it until it is over. Learn your lesson, avoid repetition of the error, and be glad it wasn’t worse. People who merely describe your stupidity — however mocking and sarcastic their descriptions — have done you no wrong.”

McCain’s advice, being so solidly-grounded in an assumption that people being publicly shamed will immediately admit their “error” and submit to the demands of mass-mind, is imbued with the effrontery of the habitually victorious. But I have always been slow to accept that large numbers of people are smarter than I, since the tests I was given by psychologists clearly showed otherwise. Just because you are bigger than me doesn’t make you right.

As I stumbled through the gauntlet of my DIRA facing each hate-contorted visage shrieking ill-will in my face, I of course tried to maintain a manly posture. My profession is to prevail in adversity, and I answer only to myself and the laws. How insulting to the mass! No cowering. No apologies. No concession to their wisdom. How dare I sue Matt Inman! Indiegogo! All the saints in the Cyber-Temple!

In this, I may have resembled Rodney King early in the engagement, when he twice confronted his tormenters in a post-TASER rage. You always hope, that just for a second, they were afraid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb1WywIpUtY But anyone watching the video knows they’re not afraid. They’re turned on. The idea that Rodney was going to grab a gun from one of them? Absurd. The first one to think that would’ve backed up, unholstered his gun, and taken aim. Rodney had no chance. Nor did I. It’s like watching an avalanche hit a ski lodge. No survivors.

So “Streisand Effect” does not, in fact, describe anything that arises due to the conduct of a Rapeutation victim. “Streisand Effect” is simply a description of an unrelieved assault by a distributed Internet mob, i.e., a DIRA. The idea that “Streisand did it to herself” is patently absurd. She did not launch, maintain, or participate in her own Rapeutation.

Like the LAPD cops who beat Rodney, the Rapeutationists get paid to launch, maintain and participate in DIRAs. It lends to a Rapeutationist’s credibility that he appear to be employed. Merely claiming “tech employment” in the Rapeutation-sphere is sufficient to make you a tech expert, at least enough to join in a scorn-a-thon against an object of hatred that has become au courant. In moments of mass hate, few will quibble with the grammar of your hate-speech. So in one sense it is an environment of universal goodwill, in which the Streisand Effect is born.

Mike Masnick is generally given credit for stealing Barbra Streisand’s name and turning it into a stalking horse for unbridled sadism. How’s that work, you say? You still need more lessons? Let’s go right to the fount of DIRA wisdom, shall we? A poster at Popehat puts it all in the right light in a post that explains why it took two trials to convict any of Rodney King’s tormentors:

“[I]f you really really really want to follow someone on the street, burst into their home, pull a gun, and shoot them to death, I suggest the following two-step process:

1) be a police officer with union representation.

2) say repeatedly “I thought he was going for a gun”. Even when no gun is ever found, keep saying this.

The post is, from a statistical point of view, unimpeachable. Fear of nonexistent guns by police is a widespread phenomenon, and they will kill you for it. And when they do, they do not go to jail.

This is because homicide is justified by reasonable fear, and it is not unreasonable to fear guns in a gun-riddled society. So to get away with murder, the killer almost always has to blame the victim.

Masnick knew what he was doing when he stole the name Barbra had burnished with a lifetime of work and used it as a weapon to blacken her. He gave the DIRA mob, and all future mobs, a convenient way to blame the victim, and argue that their Rapeutation was due to their own [general stupidity, Internet-idiocy, fill-in-the-blank-epithet]. “Streisand Effect” is a term applied retrospectively to explain a DIRA, in other words, it is a rhetorical device for allocating blame away from the obvious source of the action. For this type of thing, Masnick deserves payment. I don’t know what would be appropriate, but I’m thinking along the lines of what that gangster at the end of Pulp Fiction has in mind — gettin’ Medieval on his ass.

_______________

Comment by Charles Carreon, 5/14/2014:

A prosecutor up in Jackson County, Oregon with whom I worked in the nineties, Angie Lanier, told me how she had gotten an enhanced penalty against a kid who kicked another kid into a comba with his high-top athletic shoes, because the judge ruled that the boots were a deadly weapon. Cop boots will serve as well, as this video clip of a couple of uniformed Philadelphia criminals trying to kick Delbert Africa of the MOVE commune into a coma makes clear.

Sometimes, I swear, I am slow on the fucking uptake. I’m sitting here, reading Bruce Sterling’s “Distraction,” that I immediately thought of when Netwar exploded around my ears. But it had slipped out of my collection, probably gifted away, and not until a few months ago did I order the book from Amazon. Sterling’s putting words in the mouth of the wheelchair-bound hacker, Kevin, responding to a question about why two mobs, the Regulators and the Moderators, hate each other:

“Why do mobs always hate each other? Somebody stole somebody’s girlfriend, somebody hacked somebody’s phones. They’re mobs. So they have no laws. So they have to feud with each other. It’s tribal. Tribes always act like that.”

And now I’m laughing, because I realize that I marched into the feud between Funny Junkers and Oatmealers like Pharaoh marching into the Red Sea, thinking I was Moses. I literally saw the image in my mind as I was walking down the hall.

Ah well, better knowledge now than never. And now, of course, I understand better why people would think it stupid and arrogant of me to ignore the risks of inserting yourself in the middle of a mob and trying to affect its behavior. Indeed, past experience has taught me that one can sustain serious injury engaging in such exercises.

For example, the first Ramones concert I ever went to, I went with a friend who is a very tiny person. Of course, we went up to the very front. The “Hey, Ho, Let’s Go” chant started building in advance of the stage walk-on, and the crowd started surging, sort of threatening to curl over on us, actually. My friend got scared, and wanted out of the front line. I grabbed her hand and started pushing straight for the back of the Palladium. I was halfway through the dense pack of bodies, squeezed leather-to-leather about fifty bodies thick, when Joey walked on with the band, shouted “One, two, three, four!” and started the mayhem. The band exploded and all the bodies around us detonated into a mosh pit populated with flailing elbows, knees, and hands and heads. My friend lost her footing. As I and others reached down to scoop her up, I extended an arm out, trying to hold back the crowd. My arm was promptly dislocated. We struggled out of the boiling dance-mob and although I was able to put my shoulder back in its socket, I was in a pain haze for a half hour that took a lot of the fun out of the show. It took weeks to heal, but the only sign of injury was a small bruise on the shoulder. I’d like to say I didn’t repeat the error, but actually, I did the exact same damn thing at another Ramones concert a year or so later, playing do-gooder in the mosh pit for some random mosher who fell down. But that time, I knew the drill, popped my shoulder back in easily, self-medicated aggressively with Budweiser, and had a good time.

Okay, now I know mobs exist on the Internet. I fucking swear I did not know. “Stoopid!” roars the crowd. Okay, I admit it. I was stupid. “Internet lawyer? Internet bonehead more like it!” Okay, also true. Not knowing that there were Internet mobs was sort of like a South Sea Captain in the nineteenth century not knowing that there were cannibals on some islands.

The lesson? “Never get involved in a game of which you do not know the rules.” Right. You can take that to the bank.

So now I am older, yes. Wiser, also. Contrite? Are you kidding? Let me tell you something — more things of value are discovered in the wreckage of perceived disaster than the guardians of order would like you to believe. I may not have known mobs before, but now I know mobs like a surfer knows the sea after he's been munched by a giant wave, had his board busted and been coughed up on the beach.

It reminds me of my own poem, “After Troy,” that I wrote about the Sex.com case. My war-weary lines are yet the light of wisdom at last — the glimmering that illuminates the true things of value — home, hearth, and love. And now that I know what crowds are, I might get into crowdsurfing.

After Troy, by Charles Carreon

To destroy another’s homeland is not brave.The gods appoint the hoursOf man’s destruction, and enemiesBut loot the ruins of that which heaven overturns.

To be long away from home in battle is not sweet.The spirit craves only the warmth of the home fires,The familiar shape of one’s own islandCarved against the sky.

An old goat sticks to the highlandsWhere men don’t trust their feet.A clever fellow watches and waits.Time does his work for him.

Now numberless leagues of seaSeparate my men from those they love.The waves give not a single inch,And silence is heard from above.

Adventures have carved sinews on my back,Streaked my beard with grey.The work of outwitting gods and men,Is with me every day.

Scylla and Charybdis will I dareTheir gnashing teeth will meet my glare,And Circe with her magics tryAnd little better fare.

As Heracles for golden applesJourneyed to the sun,So to join Penelope,The longest race I’ll run.

An Unlikely Win Improves The Odds of Winning For the American Buddha Digital Libraryby Charles Carreon9/18/13

One-Percent Chance Comes In For American Buddha

Motions to transfer venue are some of the least-often granted motions in the Federal system — ninety-nine percent (99%) of these motions are denied. Nonetheless, my client American Buddha, through the good offices of local counsel in Portland, just won its motion to transfer venue from the US District Court of Portland, Oregon to Arizona. Magistrate Judge Dennis J. Hubel’s opinion is a well-reasoned discussion of all the arguments made by both parties.

With This Ruling, American Buddha Doubled Its Odds of Winning

Cited in the motion to transfer venue is an interesting study that may have influenced Judge Hubel’s analysis, although he didn’t refer to it. Entitled “Exorcising the Evil of Forum-Shopping,” by Kevin M. Clermont and Theodore Eisenberg of Cornell Law School, it indicates that, by securing a transfer, American Buddha will statistically reduce Penguin’s chance of winning from 58% to 29%:

“Utilizing a database of the three million federal cases terminated over thirteen recent years, we take a closer look. Most importantly, we see that the plaintiffs’ rate of winning drops from 58% in cases in which there is no transfer to 29% in transferred cases. This dramatic effect prevails over the range of substantively different types of cases. A big part of the most probable explanation for this drop is that plaintiffs are indeed forum-shopping, but that courts are transferring cases to more just courts, so that the decrease in the win rate reflects the fact that courts are stripping plaintiffs of unjust forum advantages. Statistical analysis supports this explanation and, at long last, demonstrates that forum does affect outcome.

I also got the ninety-nine percent failure rate on transfer motion quoted above, from this same study:

After transfer, American Buddha will have the opportunity to try its case to a community where the University of Arizona School of Library Science is a major feature of civic pride, where our yearly Book Fair draws many thousands of book lovers, book dealers, and even circus performers to ply their wares and skills. American Buddha’s members will be able to testify in open court as to the value and use of the Nader Library operated by American Buddha. it’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, with only one caveat: Although it was within his power to simply grant the motion, Judge Hubel very considerately gave Penguin the opportunity to have the decision reviewed by an Article III judge. Penguin may take the opportunity to object to Judge Hubel’s Findings & Recommendations, which would thus further delay the resolution of the issues on the merits.

American Buddha: Litigating For Library Freedom Since 2009

For those unfamiliar with the story, this case has been going on since 2009, when Penguin filed its lawsuit in the Southern DIstrict of New York — a jurisdiction where Amereican Buddha could not lawfully be sued — a finding of fact and principle of law that was firmly established when District Judge Ronnie Abrams dismissed the action for the second time after four years of litigation that traversed the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and elicited an opinion from the New York Court of Appeals holding that copyrights for written books are injured in the state where the copyright owner resides. While the NYCA certainly intended thereby to help Penguin to victory in the SDNY, the facts were so compelling that American Buddha won anyway.

Penguin Abandons The “Virtual Library Only Doctrine”

Finally, I should note an interesting thing that happened to Penguin’s legal position up in Oregon — it abandoned its contention that the Library Exemption from Copyright Liability provided by 17 USC Section 108 and associated common law doctrines does not apply to “virtual-only libraries.” Why did that happen? Because American Buddha’s Motion to Transfer Venue made it clear that establishing that the Library has a “brick-and-mortar” facility will be crucial to overcoming that contention. American Buddha made this argument in its reply brief in support of the motion to transfer venue:

To the question, “Why does the defendant’s inability to present its witnesses in thePortland venue, when Penguin could as easily litigate in Tucson, not justify transfer?” Penguinsimply predicts victory on liability before trial. However, this argument suffers from at least twofatal defects.

First, as an element of liability at paragraph 27 of the Complaint, Penguin alleges:

“The exemption from liability for copyright infringement under Section 108 of the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 108, does not apply to “virtual-only” libraries and archives, i.e., those that do not conduct their operations through physical premises.” (Complaint, page 5, Docket # 1.)

This allegation clearly puts the question of whether defendant has a “brick and mortar” library in issue as a predicate to establishing Penguin’s theory of liability, and Defendant has presented the declarations of witnesses for the defense who cannot testify in Portland, but can testify in Tucson. [Fact citations omitted.] Thus, this issue can only be fairly tried in the District of Arizona.

In response to this argument, what did Penguin do? Well everyone knows how agile penguins are — they can swim on their backs, flip around on slick ice, and reverse position in mid-trajectory. So that’s what Penguin did, attempting to jettison the “Virtual Only Library Doctrine” by requesting an amendment. Initially, Penguin almost achieved that shift in position without dispute, because due to an error in communications, the first set of lawyers for American Buddha mistakenly agreed to allow the amendment; however, that error was quickly corrected with this Notice of Erroneous Filing, once discovered by yours truly. American Buddha’s new attorney then filed an Opposition to Plaintiff's First Amended Complaint http://punklawyer.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/FILED.OPP_.FAC_.pdf that argued that if Penguin’s First Amended Complaint were filed, that Penguin should be precluded from trying to resuscitate what American Buddha dubbed the “Virtual Only Library Doctrine”:

“The Court is respectfully requested to grant the motion only upon the condition that Penguin shall be precluded from presenting any declarations, lay or expert testimony, documentary or demonstrative evidence, or arguments of counsel directed at establishing that Virtual-Only Libraries are barred from asserting any defense that is available to “brick-and-mortar” libraries.

Judge Hubel decided to leave the decision on this request to the court that will be handling the case in the future:

“The court GRANTS the motion to amend, but in doing so makes no ruling with respect to the defendant’s request that if the motion is granted that plaintiff be estopped from making any specific argument for the remainder of the case. That issue will be decided by whichever court handles the case after ruling on the motion to change or transfer venue….

Judge Hubel has now ruled favorably on the Motion to Transfer Venue, and referred his Findings & Recommendations to Article III Judge Michael W. Mosman for approval or the consideration of objections from Penguin.

I got to Haight Ashbury in 1968. The Summer of Love was 1967. I couldn’t help it. I rushed. I was only twelve when I ran away, but run I did, to where the sign flashing “LSD” could be seen, irrigating the brains of a new generation that had no need of footwear. The LSD was still flowing, for those who wanted it, and although speed was said to have killed the scene already, among the embers I found some glowing coals, enough to give light to my own brain. So I caught the flight I’d been aiming for, and even went to a Grateful Dead show at Speedway Meadows, where I passed out after a paper cupful of Red Mountain. The littlest hippie slept through his first acid rock concert.

But I’d missed it. The scene. The explosion of radiant color and psychedelic design that transformed art, style, clothing and architecture had already pulsed out of the Haight like a plasma wave from a supernova, blasting the entire country with a jolt of creativity. There were only remnants of the blast left visible in empty storefonts where headshops and utopia-incubators had once exhibited their mad splendor. It felt like a carnival had come through town and stolen the kids, leaving behind dazed hangers-on who were still trying to figure out where everyone had teleported.

When I got married -- that I did early, as soon as I turned eighteen. I liked the girl I was with at the time, and couldn’t see any reason why I would be changing my mind about her anytime soon, so I proposed to her as we were standing on the side of a road, hitchhiking. I was right about her. She was crazy about me, and I would never have to wonder if somebody loved me again for the rest of my life. Nice to have that taken care of, since being unloved is the first sin, in my book.

We went to India, like all good hippies thirsting for Enlightenment in those days, flying Icelandic Air for $225 round trip to Luxembourg, whence we hitched to Munich, whence we trained to Istanbul with a short and bureaucratically perilous detour through Yugoslavia, a country for which we did not have a visa, but where we found ourselves due to an embarkation error somewhere along the train line. Fortunately, Yugoslavian police had sense of humanity, problem did not blossom into international incident, and we made it to Istanbul without even paying bribe. Also had some good meat strudel in the city of Mnic.

At one time it had been easy to go overland to India in a helter skelter fashion, getting your visa for Turkey in Istanbul, getting your visa for Iran in Turkey, getting your visa for Afghanistan in Iran, getting your visa for Pakistan in Afghanistan, and finally getting your visa for India in Pakistan. It was still possible when we did it, because we did it, but it wasn’t quite as easy as it had been. We had to wait weeks in each place, and waiting for a visa isn’t quite like vacationing in the country. You keep going back to the same government building again and again, to see the same bureaucrats, and it’s not like a leisure activity at all.

People were used to us, too. They were like bored of us. Oh, hippies. You guys have no money. You want drugs. Your women are young and beautiful, they dress like whores, but you won’t sell them to us. What are you good for? By the time we got to India, it was like. Oh, hippies. You want religion. What does religion mean to you? It is one more trinket? Our religion is precious to us. Go away. We already sent the type of guru you are looking for to California. Go there. That is where you will find him.

We also got to the land late. As in, “I gotta get back to the land and set my soul free,” the promised land of Woodstock as prophesied by Joni Mitchell in her song of that name. As Joni observed, “by the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong,” and thus there were plenty of older hippies ahead of us, and the communes were kinda booked up when my wife and I showed up, all wide-eyed and innocent. Instead of utopias, what we got were little feudopias where everyone swore allegiance to the land, and those who owned the land got the best mates and sleeping quarters. Psychologically, these communities conceived of themselves as Camelots, but came across more as Peyton Place with beads and feathers. There was usually some kind of feud going on over some point of procedure or access to amenities or failed gardening enterprise.

I even got to the law late. Like how could that be? Are there seasons in the law? Yes. There was a pretty cool time in the law of the United States, about ten years before I got to law school. The Warren Court criminal procedure decisions hadn’t yet been rendered nullities by decades of reactionary retrenchment. Tort law had been expanded to give meaningful remedies to people injured by defective products. Consumer law was generally understood to be intended to actually benefit consumers. Contracts had to be read and signed to be enforceable. An atmosphere of common sense emanates from many of the judicial decisions of the late sixties and through the seventies.

By the time I got into the courts and offices where law practice happens, the impact of the Reagan judicial appointments, the rhetoric of tort reform, the anti-trial-lawyer sentiment, and the law-and-economics movement had created a strong counterforce that was undermining all that commendable progress that I’d learned about in law school. Now, twenty-six years later, only a hollowed-out husk remains of the robust structure of rights and protections that made citizenship meaningful. An unread clickwrap agreement is as enforceable as the most solemnly-signed agreement. There’s no time to read, and much need for the protection contracts give the corporate lucre-lords. Indeed, most legislation is passed without ever having been read by the Congress and the state legislatures, the product of lobbyist-draftsmen who write the law the corporations pay to see go on the books. To go to the courts with idealism in your heart is to ally your fortunes with those whose failure is pre-ordained. If you wish to rise, serve the powerful without scruple.

I arrived late to the dot-com era, in 1999, when almost all of the IPOs had already blasted off. I got on the first dot-com that would have me: Sex.Com. Thereafter, for years I was believed to be either counting my money or marooned in orbit with scantily-attired shipmates. Neither was true. I wrote all about it in my book The Sex.Com Chronicles, a tale of legal intrigue that my agent dubbed “the best book I couldn’t sell.”

Now I have totally missed out on Silk Road and its kingpin, the Dread Pirate Roberts. I knew the scene was going down because a client put me onto Bitcoin, and Silk Road was, as all the world now knows, Bitcoin-powered. I am inured to having my entire life examined in minute detail, and far too technologically lazy to bother wrapping my nonexistent privacy in a cloak of TOR. Hell, I can barely stand going to Second Life. I could never be bothered with Silk Road.

I have missed out on most of the big drug markets in my life, but I did once buy some putative mescaline at Cortez Park, an open-air psychedelic supermarket in the far northern reaches of the Phoenix suburbs. It was exhilarating seeing all that felonious activity right at hand. We came in a carload, and got our caps of mesc about as fast as we'd get tacos at Jack in the Box. Then we plunged into the safety of the dark desert with a reliable driver who wasn’t tripping. He was schizophrenic, though, so we all felt comfortable together and enjoyed a walk deep into the desert, following the power lines. You can’t get lost as long as you remember what direction you were going. Probably anyone these days would tell you what we did was dangerous – people get lost in the desert and die all the time, in broad daylight, much less tripping in the dark. But danger was the last thing on our minds.

Nowadays, people buy drugs without leaving their computer. They get high in the comfort of their dorm rooms. They might get overheated at a rave, but probably won’t be found wandering through the wilderness tripping at night. But the online wilderness poses a serious threat to their safety and health. Although DPR isn’t being depicted as a victim of FBI entrapment, he is. Because it’s always easier to engineer guilt than to investigate crime, the FBI twice sent provocateurs to ensnare DPR with blackmail threats. DPR, trapped inside his own mind, fell into the role of criminal mastermind. At that point, he was playing a game against a far greater criminal mastermind – Hoover’s Bureau. They cooked him with exquisite care, and he was thoroughly roasted. It is a tragic story, with only one real victim – DPR himself.

At this point, it’s obvious someone should have been selling collectibles – I keep seeing a Physical Bitcoin with a silk-laden camel on it, with a palm and a pyramid in the background. On the other side, what else but the classic image of the original Dread Pirate Roberts? When you think about it, it’s not too late to strike a commemorative Physical Bitcoin to honor what was once four percent of the Bitcoin economy. Put together a crew to push that on Kickstarter, eh?

Of course no one will be doing that. This is one cool, high-tech thing that people do not want to be associated with. The early adopters who had Bitcoins confiscated in the seizure of Silk Road are wondering if they’re going to get some undesired attention from law enforcement. Apparently, Bitcoin leaves a lot more of a trail than good old cash, the stuff that greases your average black economy. It’s unlikely that the FBI will dig all that deeply into the implications of the data they’ve seized. With a big fish like DPR to fry, a substantial cadre of agents will go into trial preparation mode, characterized by serious overtime billing. That will take the edge off any further investigation. We presume. But if you get that call from the Bureau, or someone who might be the Bureau, just remember, you can always call a lawyer first.

I was nineteen years old, barefoot in front of about a dozen tai chi students on the lawn in front of the most southern and traditional of the buildings on the ASU campus. I had learned tai chi from a woman at ASU, and after a couple of years of practice, and reading Al Huang’s beautiful book, “Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain,” I decided to teach others. I joined movement instruction with guided visualization, and the students loved it. Attendance stayed high throughout the semester, and we even met for extra sessions on the campus lawns, as we were doing on this day.

One of my students was a handsome young lawyer named Kit, a refined gentleman in his thirties who had dark hair and a close-cropped dark beard. He gave off a slight whiff of superiority, while working gamely to relax the surface rigidity that infused his body. He always maintained a slightly aloof stance, and seemed quietly amused at my audacity in holding myself out as a tai chi teacher. At some point, he started to react negatively to something I had barely noticed, which was that by silent consensus, the group had adopted the view that whatever I said to do had to be done. This was necessary, in effect, because I often did interactive guided visualizations where, for example, half the people play yin roles, and half play yang roles, so people adapt to each other and perhaps fuse their energy fields.

So there we were on the lawn, doing one of these interactive visualization movements, where half of the students are passing imaginary energy-spheres to the other half of the students. Well, Kit declined to play his role. He adopted a stiff pose, and like Bartleby the Scrivener declaring that he “preferred not to,” stopped performing my instructions. It was an alarming development, Kit going on strike. His fellow spiritual laborers were shocked. Their eyes begged him to come to his senses, their bodies inclined toward him, their arms reached out, fingers extended, voices beseeching, trying to draw him back into the sacred labor. At the head of the group, I spoke to Kit like a man trying to lure a kitten out of a tree. Kit began backing away, I followed, and he broke into a semi-run. I and the entire group surged after him briefly, until a thought brought me up short — “This is not right. The tai chi class should not chase Kit around the campus. In fact, I think we are acting crazy.” Gesturing behind my back, I stopped the forward surge of my students, and told Kit to please feel free to go. After the obligatory exchanges of nonsense words that inevitably conclude such donnybrooks, he left.

I left off with giving public classes after other events occurred that confirmed I was having incipient cult problems. In those years, cults sprang up like dust devils in the heat, and the idea of having followers was beyond serious conception. While I read holy books in abundance, I was sifting these works for bliss-provoking illuminations, and understood ethics in a manner befitting a member of the organic-food/hippie subculture – in pretty broad strokes. I realized that while I could help people experience “meditative states,” I didn’t have much to offer those seeking spiritual insight beyond homilies lifted from holy books. So I could bullshit students or bow out of the teaching game. I chose to give it up.

Later in life, when I have received occasional spurts of admiration in my legal career, I have tried to ask myself, “Who is this person, and why do they like me?” Sometimes the answer has been, “I just got this guy a great deal and he’s going to get out of jail sooner than he’d hoped, so he’s momentarily filled with gratitude.” At such moments, often experienced in a jail consultation cell, I figured it was okay to bask in the glow. But you know, if you’re sitting in your office and you ask yourself who loves you, and your answer is “a bunch of felons,” then you might begin to feel like life was passing you by, and you should do something to acquire at least some friends with a more socially acceptable profile. That happened to me after five years of being a Federal public defender. I really felt like I needed to get out more, meet ordinary people, and think about something other than crime.

So I stopped taking criminal cases, and therefore spent less time thinking about crime. One has to think about something, however, and I ended up thinking about sex. That may have lead to me working on the Sex.Com case, which lead to representing pornographers, who can be somewhat embarrassing to represent. But times being what they are, most lawyers will agree to perform lawful services within their professional specialty when legal tender is offered in a sufficient amount, regardless of the source.

It has been said that I must have been hard up to take on FunnyJunk as a client, but that is a shot in the dark that misses its mark. Times were good when FunnyJunk came along, and I snagged the work happily, as someone who is always glad to get something new in the pipelines. To live is a dynamic flow, like flying a ram jet engine – the forward motion of the jet is essential to the functioning of the engines – or like a shark, that lacks gills and thus must cruise the depths continuously or die.

My work requires knowledge and skill, and I’ve gained some modest renown among those who know the quality of my work and the reliability of my advice. Those people seem to know other people, and thus, work arrives in time to meet some need and supply modest pleasures. I have a very short list of friends who say they like what I do in a creative way, so I inflict my works on them. I even get a heaping of adulation from my wife, balanced by savage recriminations of the most affectionate sort. So I’ve got all the friends I need.

You are incredulous, I see. How could I possibly have all the friends I need when I’m not even on Facebook? There you have it — a koan for the Social Media Buddhists.

I’m like the opposite of Popehat Ken White in this regard. He has many, many followers, and lots of them are chasing me. I know it’s not going to occur to Popehat, as it did to me, “This is wrong. Popehat followers should not chase Charles Carreon all over the Internet.” Not that I’m claiming to be superior. I was a much younger man then, nineteen, a far more intelligent time of life when it comes to realizing the obvious. And unlike Popehat, my youthful self had not spent a lifetime developing a legal philosophy to provide a cover story for personal indulgences.

Safe inside his cover story, Popehat is machinating like L. Ron Hubbard targeting suppressives. His head thrust against his periscope, he ceaselessly scans the sea for the latest foolish captain to pilot the S.S. Douchebag into his sights. “Fire 1! Fire 2!” A pause to gauge the effects, then, “We hit her amidships!” Popehat’s crew roars with triumph, and Popehat himself, oblivious to all but the delicious sensation of having his hindquarters laved by eager tongues, hoarsely exhorts his “army of Davids” to further reputational mayhem.

Popehat is an apologist for hate speech, and the proof is, he denies it proactively, while he invokes the First Amendment to protect hate speakers. Proactive denials are virtually always an admission of conscious wrongdoing.

Who pushes hate speech, now and in the past? Reactionaries. Right wingers. Their arguments are often nine-tenths verbal violence. They spew death threats, use rape metaphors, ascribe all manner of physical deformity and pathological mental states to their objects of hatred. When people victimized by these outrages try to speak up, the Free Speech Mafia, responding to the “Popehat signal” will rise to the defense of these loose-lipped spittle warriors by asserting that their hate speech was protected by the First Amendment. The Internet has turned into the type of small town where a group of bullies is terrorizing everyone, pushing everyone’s buttons and daring them to talk back.

There’s been other times in my life when I’ve looked around at the quality of my associates, and realized it was time for a change. Popehat may have high-sounding explanations to justify his conduct, but in time, the luster of being Judge Lynch for the lynching crowd is going to be seen in a much clearer light. Like the Salem judges, that history has judged fairly, consigning them to the annals of judicial infamy, Popehat has established a legacy that would already cause the head of a feeling man to bow in shame.

The Ceremony of Innocence is Drownedby Charles CarreonNovember 22, 2013

Ode to Pollock, by Marla Olmstead

What is innocence? What is it about innocence that jaded people have got to destroy it? Why the vicious attacks on even the idea that anyone is innocent? Is the media really so corrupt that the very idea of people being innocent is an offensive, obnoxious reminder that not everyone is eager to sell their soul at the altar of money? Why do documentary films about decent people turn into search and destroy missions?

What I’m all exercised about is this movie, My Kid Could Paint That, about Marla Olmstead, the painter whose works you can see at MarlaOlmstead.com. If you don’t know anything about this story, then play a little game with yourself, and go look at her work before you go any further. That way you can come to this topic with your own view of her work in the foreground of your thinking. Maybe that will help you preserve your innocence.

Probably Andy Warhol didn’t introduce the art world to cynicism, but he made it into the most saleable pose for an artist to assume against the noir backdrop of post-modern urban gloom. Warhol’s prodigy Lou Reed just died, so that tells you how long we lived with his sour brand of realism. Long enough to make it establishment creed for the boomer generation. In fact, the entire boomer experience is about disillusionment and our pain at having lost, in quick succession, Camelot, Woodstock, and Ecotopia.

Aside from those of us who fried a few too many brain cells and started down that bright tunnel of light even before we died, those of us who grew to maturity during the last quarter of the past millennium do not place a lot of stock in the viability of innocence as a survival strategy. We are inclined to figure that, if you don’t sell out, you don’t get anything, and anybody trying to tell you different is obviously sold out. But that attitude is merely a survival strategy, and it doesn’t make people like Marla Olmstead and her parents disappear. Innocence does exist, and My Kid Could Paint That tries to make that innocence disappear. In the end, the only thing that disappears is filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev’s credibility as a documentarian.

Of course, Bar-Lev is like the jackal cleaning up after the lion, because he borrows most of the “expose” portion of his film from a 60 Minutes hit piece where Charlie Rose exudes cynicism about the authenticity of Marla’s creations, distorting his visage into a gallery of masks illustrating the various genres of disbelief, while he elicits a groundless opinion from a child psychologist that Marla couldn’t have painted the works without adult assistance.

I think a documentary about a media story should actually look at the quality of the media that constitutes the story. You know, like, is Charlie Rose fulla shit? But Bar-Lev doesn’t go there, or anywhere near there. It is frankly shocking that Bar-Lev doesn’t eviscerate the core fallacy of Rose’s presentation – that a child psychologist can tell, from looking at paintings, whether they were done by a child or not! For heavens’ sake, the experts can’t even determine whether a work bought in a California thrift shop was done by Jackson Pollock! Maybe since Pollock was an alcoholic, we could talk to an alcohol rehab therapist about whether Pollock did the artwork! You can imagine the 60 Minutes episode:

Charlie Rose: So, you’re an alcohol counselor.

Counselor: Yessir, I am.

Rose: You’ve seen a lot of drunks.

Counselor: Oh yeah, a lot of ‘em.

Rose: Well we’ve shown you some paintings by a famous drunk. Do you think this other painting here was painted by the same drunk?

Counselor: Well, I’m not sure. Seems like he mighta been a little drunker when he did this one.

Yeah, I’d like to see that show. Aww, crimony get real! Beyond just failing to critique Rose’s drive-by journalism, it is bizarre that Bar-Lev, a fellow who has made a lot of films, would claim that the tawdry 60 Minutes slander-by-unqualified-expert routine actually shook his faith in the genuineness of Marla’s artistic ability. This turn of events is cheesily presented with one of those stupid, low-production value scenes where the director is driving down the road in his vehicle, with the camera photographing the interior of the car, reading some script he’s taped to his steering wheel about how he’s having all these misgivings about some abstract “people” who are going to be really disappointed when he calls them “liars.” I actually was hoping he was talking about the child psychologist Ellen Winner, and her flatulent opinion, but the Judas tone in his voice told me that was not to be.

Bar-Lev pulls this crisis of conscience crap after he has sucked us into the feel-good explosion of positivity that greeted Marla’s first show and the subsequent sales that ballooned into that most dangerous of all things – six figures preceded by a dollar sign. The number that is thrown about for the rest of the movie is $300,000. This type of money is blood in the water for the media sharks. If you are a cynical media person, a million ideas do not pop into your head when you hear about that kind of money being earned by a three-year-old. Only one idea pops into your head: “Is this kid for real?”

Oh, so I get it. It’s just another case of William Randolph Hearst telling the photographer to just get the pictures, and he’ll make the news. Bar-Lev is in fact, nothing more than a cameraman and an editor in this story. He’s not digging for the truth at any time. He’s not examining dubious assertions or revealing mistaken assumptions or finding unknown facts. He’s recycling news clips as if their every statement was fact, when in truth, some are clearly ridiculous, like the one at the beginning that says Marla’s two-year old brother commented that forty-thousand bucks would “buy a lot of candy.” It’s obvious from the movie that this was rank invention on the part of some TV reporter, because Marla’s little brother doesn’t do much with his mouth except smile and shout, and occasionally say, “I can paint, too,” in an effort to get a little attention.

What Bar-Lev has done skillfully is to worm his way into the confidence of the Olmsteads, who are two of the most extraordinary parents I have ever seen. And it is painful to see how he exploits the vulnerability of the Olmsteads, in the wake of the 60 Minutes attack, pushing Marla’s dad to create a situation where Marla will create a painting on film, for Bar-Lev’s camera. This, of course, does not work out well enough to satisfy Bar-Lev. He tries to make it seem like viewing Marla working on a canvas through this probing, voyeuristic lens, in a cold and unfriendly light, is realistic. He completely fails to see how ridiculously unrealistic and selfish his demand is. Why should a four-year-old child whose parents love and protect her worry about pleasing a guy with a camera? People with cameras come and go, and they all want to see her paint. In the end, Bar-Lev’s attitude is petulant and petty. If Marla won’t paint for him, he’ll just tell the world he doesn’t think she can really paint at all.

The evidence for Bar-Lev’s skepticism is lacking, however, and if his only argument is, “Well, she couldn’t do it in front of my camera, so I just have to doubt,” then he is far too obsessed with his camera, and should consider putting it down for a while. Things can be known without direct photographic evidence. Sometimes, things just only make sense when viewed in one way, and that way is the truth.

Marla was three years old when her Dad let her play with paint and brushes and paper. Her work was sophisticated from the beginning. She begins by engineering random effects that she blends into a full composition, making full use of the canvas, weaving bright primary colors into complementary backgrounds, all with a vital “one take” freshness. Videos of her working show a mind fluidly absorbed in its work. She rarely looks up as the minutes pass, engrossed in the swirls and patterns that she creates with precise, sensitive movements.

Ironically, all this is present and visible in Bar-Lev’s film, but he purports not to see it. He insists on releasing these clouds of skepticism that he claims he cannot dispel. He’s like the man who went to a flower show while suffering from severe flatulence. When asked how the show had been, he said it was strange, that all the flowers had smelled like shit. Bar-Lev seems to have the same problem. He looks at innocent beauty, and smells a plot to deceive the art world and harvest money by fraud. As Doug Harvey wrote in the LA Weekly back when the movie came out:

“In the final analysis, the filmmaker’s crisis of faith is unconvincing, except as one of a series of blatantly manipulative decisions that, despite the lack of any kind of empirical evidence, bolsters the most commercially viable story that can be milked from the situation — the one where Marla’s parents are supernaturally cunning con artists out to exploit the gullibility of the deluded collectors of essentially fraudulent modern art.”

Was Marla’s work really that dangerous to the art world? Of course not, but there’s no point in taking any chances, either. Is it a problem for us if, occasionally, innocence produces works of art that inspire more greatly than the products of expert labor by recognized artists? Yes, it is, because it confuses categories. Children must be children, those helpless little creatures whose minds present no threat to us because, as adults, we know more than they do. We do everything better. We’ve gained everything from our maturity and lost nothing. Except our innocence.

The rest of you folks, whose minds aren’t wormy with Net-rot, are now wondering what the hell that was about. Who’s Donna Barstow? Well, just take a look at this little photograph of a Google search of the poor woman’s name.

Ah, she’s a Rapeutation victim. Why would she be calling me? To commiserate?

No, Donna, who was once a successful cartoonist, called me because she thought that I was posting about her at Charles-Carreon.com, the not-really-a-parody site that Paul Levy, the lawyer of choice for nutcase bloggers, forced me to allow nutcase blogger Christopher Recouvreur to operate. I explained to Donna that I don’t write anything that appears on the site, even though Recouvreur signs his posts, “Charles Carreon, Esq.,” which was no doubt the cause of her confusion. But, she said, “Do you think that Ken White wrote it?” I answered that if it sounded reasonably intelligent, quite possibly it was written by Ken White, since Recouvreur is not very smart.

Donna didn’t think the post, a pseudo-interview between “Charles Carreon” and “Donna Barstow,” seemed particularly smart, but she still thought it was written by Ken White. I told her what I knew about Popehat, i.e., that he is a deranged megalomaniac with powerful legal backing, with a bete noire, a dark obsession, somewhat Jack-the-Ripperish in its hold over him, that compels him to commit one savage Rapeutation after another. The Ripper was likely a gentleman, a doctor with surgical training who was allowed to have his way with disposable women, because the London police have ever been corrupt. Look at how many London policemen are currently answering charges in the News of the World scandal, because top brass at Scotland Yard took bribes and kept the heat off Murdoch’s phone hacking and privacy invasions of well over a thousand people. Murdoch’s machine destroyed the reputations of politicians and stars, and through extortion, allowed him to exercise control over vulnerable members of Parliament. London is still a fun town.

Jack the Ripper, by Joshua Hoffine

Los Angeles is another city where shit is kept under glass and offered up for admiration, and thus it is suitable for Popehat to have his office there at 333 South Hope Street, where from his office window, he can take in the spectacle of a city where iniquity is rewarded wherever one turns. It must do the devil in his heart good to know that, while he doesn’t have the time to go out and commit all the crimes that are happening in LA, someone is taking care of that while he goes about his work of committing mayhem on the Internet. Popehat is protected by the media elites in his role as avenger of the offended sensibilities of every random geek with a hair up his or her arse. Popehat is protected not, like the Ripper because he is a gentleman, but rather because he is a useful idiot who keeps the social media economy inflated with faux controversies that fuel posting, flame wars, and the belief that vitriolic, career-destroying gossip is good. Which is just to say that he is a charter member of the First Amendment Mafia, in charge of click-bait merchandising.

What is click-bait merchandising? It is kind of like running a butcher shop for cannibals. Everyday, people who sell clicks come to your shop, and they need human-meat to use for click-bait. Obviously, they want red meat, choice cuts, with a good name. The name is the most important thing in click-bait. Names with pre-existing popularity are best, because nothing is more delicious than eating today what was off limits yesterday. This explains why Charles Carreon is considered delicious – he once had a good name and some modest fame. Today, many people enjoy eating him, without suffering pangs of conscience, because Popehat revealed him to be a dangerous beast that had to be put down. As mean as Charles Carreon was, it’s just luck the meat is any good at all.

Resident Evil 6 Opens Human Flesh Butcher Shop

Donna Barstow is a very tasty dish, highly valued as click-bait. Females are always prized by cannibals, due to the tender texture of their meat. Donna was also a very successful cartoonist, so many people found it pleasant to devour her flesh once it came on the market.

What was Donna’s sin? What turned her from a human, whom it would be taboo to eat, to a pile of cold cuts? Like Matt Inman, she was a cartoonist, and like Matt Inman, she hated people posting her cartoons on the Internet. Why, then, isn’t she being celebrated all across the Net, like Matt Inman? Since Inman’s good for standing up for the sanctity of copyrights, and Donna’s bad for doing the same thing, then obviously who Popehat pillories has nothing to do with the issues. Popehat has no loyalty to principle, and the decision about who gets rapeutated and put in the butcher shop has nothing to do with copyrights at all.

What it’s about is style. If, instead of serving DMCA notices and telling people that the law was on her side, Donna had drawn cartoons of her enemies being eaten by killer whales, and done a fund raiser to save the last Orca pod in Greenland, then she might have been celebrated like Inman. At least she would not be on the menu. But instead, being the type who talks back, she provoked a lengthy interval of King Syndrome. And now she is on display, sliced into chops and steaks, right next to the prime rib of Charles Carreon.

Well hell, I’m as Mexican as you get, if genetics are the grounds for determining the issue, and I’ll tell you Mexico is a bad neighbor-nation. Not that I think it’s the fault of the Mexicans that all the border towns are snakepits of excess. It’s the border, for crimony’s sake. It’s the fault of the governments on both sides, and while Mexico is a bad neighbor-nation, the United States is a really bad neighbor-nation. My views on the subject of Mexico-USA relations are a matter of record, with my acapella tune, A Mexican Fourth of July, being a summary of my position, and Explode on the Border, being a lighthearted romp of the theme of “golfcarts burning in the sun.” I’d have no problem discussing these issues with Donna or any other conservative type, but I wouldn’t rapeutate her for her views. That would be messed up, to use the vernacular.

Donna has a right to her opinions, and how can a “free speech advocate” like Ken Popehat White set out to destroy her career because she wanted to express them? And why the hell does a jackass like Christopher Recouvreur want to associate her name with mine in some inane interview? I suppose it’s supposed to convey the idea that Donna, being the type of person Chris disrespects, would have to hire a lawyer whom he also disrespects. Chris – wake up. No one is interested in your opinions, but could you please make it clearer that they are your opinions – y’know, by signing them “Christopher Recouvreur, DMF?”

Donna had these questions in her head when she called Ken Popehat White in his elevated glass prison in the smog. Let’s stop right here and get the picture. Popehat is sitting there behind his desk, his executive chair groaning under the strain like an Aerostar van with too many Jehovah’s Witnesses in it. He’s trying to squeeze a few billable hours out of the day, after having spent most of it sticking his nose into other people’s business, turning their lives inside out with his sanctimonious airing of their purported faults. The phone rings, Popehat picks up.

According to Donna, as soon as she introduced herself, White sounded frightened, and his voice started shaking. When she asked him why he was writing nasty things about her, he had no explanation, but was quick to threaten, “If you sue me, I’ll win!” Donna asked him what he was so paranoid about – she hadn’t said anything about suing. He answered, “Your tone implied threat.” Classic Popehat – it’s always your fault.

I was in the middle of a busy day when Donna called, but I put it all on hold to listen to her, because that picture of Popehat pissing his drawers when she called him was sweet to behold. That lady could talk as long as she wanted, and she talked quite a while, because her gift had earned her my genuine gratitude. I was happy. My heart nourished, I went back to the day’s labor with renewed vigor, my mind at ease, knowing Popehat to be, in fact, the very worm I’d imagined.

I draw a few conclusions from Popehat’s fear of Donna. He’s a terrorist, who worships the power of fear. Fear is his favorite tool, because he has faith in it. It is the greatest power in his life. We are all driven by fear, but only people like Popehat are so frightened that they worship the power of fear.

Why is it that Popehat is always busy directing fire at other people? Because he fears people, and is afraid that if they took a good look at him, they would hate him. Why that is the case, he best knows, but let us take him at his word. There’s something detestable about him, and he doesn’t want people to see it. Popehat’s serial calls to behead this, that or another Internet heretic conceal a personality whose deep hatred of others reflects profound self-loathing.

Like a serial killer, Popehat takes one victim after another to their reputational grave, after a prolonged torture that Popehat conducts with gusto, while declaring his enjoyment of the process for the admiration of Internet torture fans everywhere. But his psychopathy is not complete, for he fears the consequence of his actions. We could almost feel sorry for this poor monster that has not quite managed to throttle its own conscience.

As I mentioned earlier, alluding to the way in which Donna’s fellow copyright-hawk Matt Inman was given preferential treatment, Popehat’s style of discussing Internet speech issues does not lead to free and open discussion of the issues. Instead, the topic – in this case Donna’s alleged affront to the dignity of my fellow-Mexicanos – was lost in ad hominem, and the issue of our offended Mexican dignity was never discussed. This is of course, because the point of conducting a Rapeutation is never to vindicate some moral or political position, but rather to get on with the beating, the abuse, the identify-theft and the humiliation.